Sexual assault, racism and suicidal thoughts helped fuel a fire for fairness in Oliver that has launched her to the front of Nashville's civil rights movement

Editor's note: This story is part of a series celebrating the accomplishments of local African-Americans during Black History Month.

The 8-year-old lurched up in her bunk bed, jolted awake by her mother’s screams.

Skinny and scared, the girl walked into the hallway and her eyes got wide: Her mom and her mom’s boyfriend were tussling, moving toward the front door as the man kept grabbing for her mom’s keys.

The girl’s fear turned to anger when she saw that her mother, eyes full of tears, had blood streaming down her face from a deep gash in the center of her forehead.

The man broke loose and ran out the front door.

Enraged, the little girl tore after the man.

Buy Photo

Charlane Oliver poses for a portrait at the Vanderbilt University Bishop Johnson Black Cultural Center in Nashville on Jan. 30, 2019. Oliver studied at Vanderbilt, where she connected with other African-American women on campus and with the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.(Photo11: Andrew Nelles / The Tennessean)

“My mom was bleeding, and I felt like I had to do something,” she said, staring off, her hands balling into fists. “I can still see this plain as day.”

A day or so later, her mom’s boyfriend came back and started pounding on the front door. The girl grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen.

“If he came in there,” she said evenly, “I was gonna stab him.”

Charlane Oliver has been fighting ever since.

After battling abandonment, racism and verbal and sexual abuse, Oliver, 36, developed a passion for fairness that has propelled into Nashville’s next generation of civil rights leaders.

Oliver is co-founder of Equity Alliance, a 2-year-old group registering people of color to vote and teaching tools to help people advocate for issues that are important for African-Americans.

She also helped launch a political action committee to support African-American candidates and landed a high-profile job in U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper’s office.

Oliver and her Equity Alliance friends are engaging blacks who’d never been politically active.

Equity Alliance leaders have captured the attention of Nashville’s old guard African-American community leaders.

“I love that they’re young and taking leadership roles and doing it in a different way,” said Joyce Searcy, Belmont University’s community relations director and former longtime president of Bethlehem Center, which serves Nashville’s low-income families.

“The baton is passed to them,” Searcy said, “and I love it.”

Howard Gentry, Davidson County Criminal Court clerk and former mayoral candidate, said Oliver “is the now generation.”

Her march to that mantle started with chaos and trauma.

Dating gang members

Oliver grew up in a working-poor, mostly black section of southwest Little Rock, Arkansas, where she said her family looked like the Huxtables on the 1980s sitcom “The Cosby Show.”

Her father, an Air Force veteran who became a successful salesman, loved church ministry, and he often took his stay-at-home wife and three daughters to various churches around the city.

But Oliver learned young that looks can be deceiving: Her parents divorced when she was 7, and her mother got a teacher’s aide job and started taking in foster kids — who came with monthly stipends from the state — to make ends meet.

Oliver’s mother also started taking college courses — and started some unhealthy relationships with men.

Oliver, not even 10 years old yet, found herself taking care of the foster kids and drifting apart from her mom, who worked hard to try to improve herself and her family’s financial position.

“I might try to talk to her after school, and she would snap on us: ‘Leave me alone! I’m trying to take a nap.’ ”

Charlane Relford Oliver poses with her father, Monroe Relford, at a junior high athletics awards banquet in Little Rock, Ark. Despite being captain of the basketball, volleyball and softball teams, and having a 4.0 GPA, Oliver says she was "silently suffering inside."(Photo11: Submitted)

Her father remarried quickly, and, while he often showed up for Oliver’s sports awards banquets — she loved and excelled at softball, basketball and volleyball — her dad stopped being a big part of her life.

Oliver quietly made straight A's and took on several student leadership positions. But she turned to boys for affirmation and validation.

She lost her virginity at 13 to a 15-year-old in a street gang. That led to a series of soul-scorching relationships with gang members, and a three-year high school relationship with a teenager who was verbally abusive to her.

“It was such a dark place in my life. I literally had a 4.0 GPA, was captain of the basketball, volleyball and softball teams, president of Future Business Leaders of America, but I was silently suffering inside,” she said.

“I felt nobody loved me and nobody wanted me.”

The only reason she didn’t kill herself, Oliver said, was that she was brought up to believe people who died by suicide went to hell.

At 17, Oliver started a sexual relationship with a man who said he was 30, a man who regularly forced her to do things she didn’t want to do.

“I’ve walked in guilt and shame since then,” Oliver said.

Trauma. Abandonment. Abuse. Shame.

It all fueled a hunger for fairness that drove Oliver to succeed so she could help others.

Trust fund babies and AKA at Vanderbilt

She took advantage of a program in Arkansas designed to help poor students of color go to outstanding universities.

And suddenly, Oliver was studying at Vanderbilt University, where she at first struggled with academics and with a feeling she didn’t belong “with these rich kids and trust fund babies.”

Charlane Oliver, center, poses with her Vanderbilt University sorority line sisters in spring 2005 in front of the West End Chili's restaurant. From left are Monica Johnson, Atia Jordan Harris, Oliver, Kimyatta McClary and Audrey Austrie-Holmes.(Photo11: Submitted)

Soon, though, Oliver started connecting with African-American women on campus, with the Alpha Kappa Alpha black sorority, and with Searcy, who ran the Bethlehem Center, where Oliver did an internship.

“There were always points in my life I would see a black woman doing the damn thing, and I’d be, ‘I wanna be like her.’ ”

Oliver really got inspired for service in her $24,000-a-year job as a state human services department caseworker, especially after working with Hurricane Katrina victims who’d fled to Tennessee.

After meeting and following her husband, Leshuan Oliver, to East Tennessee for five years, she started working with the Knoxville Area Urban League, helping it create a young professionals chapter.

Oliver found a job leading an agency that found mentors for children with parents who were incarcerated.

A few years later, she and her family moved to Nashville.

A year later, a high school student named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida by a man who was part of a neighborhood watch group.

That happened two days after Oliver’s son was born, and she felt herself fill with rage.

“What kind of world am I bringing my son into? I have to raise my son in a world that doesn’t see him as human and only sees his black skin,” she thought.

Charlane Oliver, co-founder of the Equity Alliance, participates in the Nashville Women's March last year.(Photo11: Submitted)

Oliver started working as communications director for the Williamson County Chamber of Commerce, and police shootings of black men continued.

Philando Castile in Minnesota in 2016. Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma in 2016.

“These black men are being killed, traumatic experiences that only happen to black people.”

That’s when Oliver started shifting the way she saw herself, from public servant to activist.

Hitting at the jugular

The election of President Donald Trump angered Oliver, who got motivated to start working to get African-Americans more involved in politics.

“I was like, I gotta do something.”

Her first campaign was for an African-American school board hopeful, Christiane Buggs. That's when she met a fellow burgeoning young activist, Tequila Johnson.

The two of them met four other African-American women Nov. 18, 2016, at the Chili’s on West End Avenue, and they walked out three hours later having created the Equity Alliance and a separate political action committee to support black candidates.

Soon, they started hosting panels and focus groups and forums and town hall meetings on black political engagement.

Charlane Oliver, center, poses with then interim Mayor David Briley on April 21, 2018, at an Equity Alliance voter registration block party at Hartman Park. Also pictured are Equity Alliance co-founders Kyonzte Toombs, left, and Tequila Johnson, right.(Photo11: Submitted)

That led to voter registration drives for the 2018 midterm elections, drives that helped register 80,000 new voters statewide.

Next up for Oliver and her colleagues: issues that affect the African-American community.

“We’re trying to remove barriers, hitting at the jugular of what’s getting people oppressed. It all starts with the vote. Health care, women’s rights, environment — there’s a policy tied to it, and that policy is made by someone you vote for.”

Community leaders of all colors — including her boss — are taking notice.

“Charlane is rare because she moves in all worlds. And she excels in all these worlds, whether it was as a Vanderbilt undergraduate or community activist or working to make federal government help everyone regardless of skin color,” said Cooper, D-Nashville.

“She communicates well, and she knows how to inspire people. We couldn’t be prouder of her.”

Phyllis Y. Nichols, president and CEO of the Knoxville Urban League, has been following her mentee since Oliver’s days in East Tennessee.

“What she brings is making sure people are well informed, making sure there’s diversity of thought. She expands the tent so it’s not just leadership by clique or association,” Nichols said.

Oliver said her past informs her activism and leadership, and she believes there are reasons her life unfolded as it did.

“I didn’t ask for the spotlight,” she said. “God put me in this position.”

Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384 or on Twitter @bradschmitt.

Download the app: Read more stories about Tennesseans making a difference on your mobile device.